Photograph of model of Burt Johnson’s “Spanish Music,” 1916 sent by artist to President Blaisdell

On Friday, August 14, 2015 Burt Johnson’s 1916 sculpture “Spanish Music,” expertly restored by Donna Williams of Williams Conservation, was reinstalled on the rebuilt fountain in Lebus Court. The sculpture was a gift to the college of the Class of 1915 and had remained in place in the courtyard until earlier this year, when a section of the fountain collapsed, leading to its rebuilding by McEachron Construction and Design based on photographs of the original fountain, and providing the opportunity to repair the statue’s broken flute and conduct an overall restoration. There will be a reception in Lebus Court to celebrate the restored fountain and statue early in the fall semester, so keep an eye out for the announcement on this News page.

Daisy Adams (’16) was awarded the annual Rembrandt Club Summer Research Grant to conduct research on the early twentieth-century American silversmith Clara Barck Welles. Welles studied metalwork at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1900 opened her own silver company, The Kalo Shop, which became one of the most important silver workshop in the Midwest. Daisy will travel to Chicago, as well as New York City, to examine the work of Welles and her students and delve into the archives of the Kalo Shop.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Amy Lyford, professor of art history and associate dean of arts and humanities at Occidental College in Los Angeles, for her book Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930–1950 (University of California Press, 2013). The text is a deeply researched examination of the early career of the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Lyford skillfully illuminates the artist’s practices and activism through richly detailed formal analysis and reference to diverse archival resources.
The three jurors who awarded the $3,000 prize were Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley; Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of American art and undergraduate chair of the department of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania; and Kevin Murphy, Eugénie Prendergast Curator of American Art at the Williams College Museum of Art.

Of the book, the jurors wrote, “Lyford tells an entirely new story about how art travels, and how it might be marked as simultaneously ‘foreign’ and also ‘American.’ Her careful account of Noguchi’s projects in these decades foregrounds the artist’s persistent concerns about labor and contributes meaningfully to debates about the role of the artist within a wider economic landscape. Beautifully written and with urgently articulated stakes with regards to racism and citizenship, Lyford’s book draws from and contributes to an interdisciplinary set of concerns within Asian American studies, critical race theory, and art history. At heart it is also a book that grapples with modernism—its forms as well as its ideologies—to argue for a politics of abstraction. This pioneering book will change how we think about Noguchi, modernist sculpture, and American art.”

Lyford will give the annual Eldredge Prize lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on January 27th, 2016. For more information about the prize, and to see a list of past winners, please visit: http://www.americanart.si.edu/research/awards/eldredge/.A

The symposium on medieval art on Friday, March 27 in honor of Judson Emerick’s retirement after 40 years of teaching art history at Pomona College was a great success, in terms of both intellectual stimulation and conviviality. The photographs below capture the celebratory mood of the event.